Little Lamb Research Paper

Music has been a part of our culture since the beginning, from Gregorian chants to digital downloads. Before recording, music was passed along through singing and the teaching of the young. Music then moved into the era of creation with it being written, though only musicians knew how to read the music, but over time even the need for musicians to decipher the music became unnecessary. The ability for even the average man to listen to music began as technology started to catch up with the growing demand for music. Thomas Edison recorded the first ever song on a tinfoil cone, the recording was Mary had a Little Lamb. From there several different types of phonographs were built and patented. They would use wax covered cylinders and 7 inch disks.
It is said that the first words ever recorded were “halloo” in July of 1877 an early paper cone prototype derived from his 1876 telegraph repeater. To make the record,the user spoke into a mouthpiece,causing variations in air pressure, or sound waves, to set a small diaphragm vibrating. Attached to the diaphragm was a stylus that indented the vibration pattern in a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a rotating cylinder. ( Dewalt “Turning Points: A Short History of Sound Recording and Record Players” 1998) In 1878 Edison was granted a patent for a phonograph using tinfoil cylinders that had a 2 to 3 minute capacity. Soon more improvements would be made on the early designs. Lead cylinders and brass discs would be used as inventors would start to use different materials. In 1881, the first lateral-cut records were made. In 1885, a second type of phonograph was invented by Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter; they were granted patent 341,214 on a machine that they called a “Graphophone” using wax-coated cylinders incised with vertical-cut grooves. (Schoenherr, Steve “Recording Technology History" 1999) By the 1900s mass duplication of the cylinders was in full swing and improvements were being made seemingly every year. 1902 Edison introduced Gold Mold cylinders which had an improved wax surface and were more easily to be mass produced. The same
Using a diamond stylus,it would make surface noise lower on the cylinders and would prove to be a higher acoustic quality. The next year in 1913 Edison would finally give in to the flat discs when he started selling the Diamond-disc players and recordings. In 1917 the first Jazz record was produced, the record was called “Livery Stable Blues” recorded by Original Dixieland Jass Band. Soon. Many popular artist of the day would start to record their music to be bought and sold to the masses. Public address amplifiers and speakers were soon developed by AT&T. In 1921, majority record sales would start to decline due to the growth of live radio. 1925 would see the first sales of the first electrically recorded discs and orthophonic phonograph s using the Western Electric system developed at AT&T. This new invention would make it possible to record whole orchestra's and symphonies, it would also record sound motion